


On Loan

by Theoroark



Series: Nobody's Fault [2]
Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Friendship, Gen, Loss of Bodily Autonomy, Strike Team era, mild body horror
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-21
Updated: 2018-05-21
Packaged: 2019-05-09 19:46:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,030
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14722451
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Theoroark/pseuds/Theoroark
Summary: Ana and Gabe compare notes on being government experiments.





	On Loan

“How’d you get your eye?” Gabriel asks. Ana doesn’t move the eye in question off the surveillance monitors they’re covering, but she does raise an eyebrow.

 

“Why do you ask?”

 

“Curious, I guess,” he says. “It’s the closest thing I’ve heard to another country’s SEP. I wonder sometimes, how it was different.”

 

Ah. Ana leans away from the laptops and turns from the grainy pictures of the city block they’re staking out, and considers Gabriel. He’s lying down leaning against the chimney, legs splayed out. He took his jacket off earlier but now that the July sun is finally setting, he has it at the ready, bunched in his lap. They’re both from sensibly warm places. When they’re stationed in cold areas, they huddle together and roll their eyes every time Torbjorn tells them to buck up.

 

“It wasn’t as big a thing, I think,” she tells him. “They just did some screening and it was one surgery. I had to spend a month in the hospital for observation, but after that, I just had come in every now and then. And I don’t really have much contact with them now. I don’t know. It was low key.”

 

Gabriel nods but looks unsatisfied, and Ana feels a twinge of annoyance. She can’t force herself to have suffered like he did, and anyway, doesn’t he have Jack for this?

 

“Why did you sign up?” he asks, and that throws her again.

 

“You know,” she says. “Everyone was scared. Sam and I had just gotten together, I knew I wanted a kid, and so…” She shrugs. “I really wanted to get out alive. And so I would take anything that upped my chances of surviving. Everyone’s chances of surviving. Fareeha’s chance.”

 

He nods again, still looks unsatisfied. Now she has no idea what he’s looking for. Maybe it’s not the commiseration, maybe it’s a shared ideology, but he should know her well enough by now not to expect that. Gabriel may be crystal clear about what he wants on the field, but off of it he can be obnoxiously opaque.

 

One of them has to stop dancing, and it doesn’t look like it’s going to be him, so. “What’s bothering you, Gabriel?” she asks.

 

“Ah.” She gets up and sits next to him, and he tilts his head back. “I was just… thinking.”

 

“You poor thing.”

 

“I joined the SEP because of what you said– the war and the fear and shit,” he continues, ignoring her. “But my family– they were fucking horrified. They begged me not to do it. The last time we talked before it, my mom just broke down, and she kept repeating, ‘they won’t even give us your body, they won’t even give us your body.’” He draws his knees up to his chest. “We’re fine now, now that they know I’m fine. But like… I don’t know. They were so scared. And I did that to them, and so I keep wondering how bad I fucked up how I handled it. And I wonder if they were right.”

 

Ana nods. “I didn’t tell anyone, not even Sam, because I was afraid of that,” she admits. He laughs.

 

“Smart.”

 

“Not really. Everyone was so mad that I had kept it from them. I think Sam almost left me, then.”

 

“Yeah,” Gabriel says. “I can see that. I’m sorry.”

 

“Yeah,” she says. She remembers the yelling and the tears and her extending her hospital stay under the pretense of giving them more data, but actually because she was afraid to talk to him face to face. Their relationship was never the same after the surgery. She’s reminded that it never should have gotten to that point in the first place. That Sam deserved honesty, and she hadn’t even been able to be honest with herself quite yet.

 

But she’s already talked to Gabriel about that– told him she was aroace before she told Sam, how did it ever get to that point at all? She doesn’t feel like delving into that honesty again. So she says, “And my procedure wasn’t nearly as... involved, as the SEP was.”

 

He tilts his head and studies her more closely, but to her relief, he sees something different. “You really just got through it, no problem?” he asks. “It really just wasn’t a big deal?”

 

“I mean. No, I guess not.” He keeps watching her and she sighs. “I mean like… I don’t know. It was about as invasive as OBGYN stuff.”

 

“But there, there’s a history. People know what they’re doing,” Gabe points out. “There have been plenty of pregnant people. You were one of the first to have a bionic implant.”

 

“Yeah, you’re right. I should have been more scared than I was. And like…” She stops and cocks her head. “You want to hear something gross?”

 

“Always.” Ana laughs.

 

“Okay, so they did modeling and shit for the implant, so it would perfectly match the eyeball it was replacing. But somehow, they fucked it up, and my new eye was too big for the socket.”

 

“Oh no,” Gabe whispers.

 

“Yeah,” Ana says enthusiastically. “So it was pressing up against my tear duct constantly. I was a fuckin’ faucet.”

 

“Holy shit.” Gabe’s clearly inspecting her right eye now and she grins. “How did they fix it?”

 

“Took out the tear duct. But they didn’t have a replacement at the ready, and it hurt like hell to keep my eye open, even with a patch. And since I can’t wink, I ended up just walking around with my eyes closed for a week.”

 

“Wait.” Gabriel holds up a hand and she raises an eyebrow. “What do you mean you can’t wink?”  
  
“I mean I can’t wink?”

 

“Try to wink right now.” She does and Gabriel frowns at her failure. “Huh.”

 

“Why would I have lied about this.”

 

“It just seems like you should be able to wink.” She rolls her eyes and he leans back against the wall again. “Well, anyway. That wasn’t that gross.”

 

“I have it on good authority that anything involving eyeballs not doing what they should is gross.”

 

“It’s weird,” Gabriel says resolutely. “But not gross. And trust me. I know gross.”

 

She jostles him and he grins. “Just one-up me already,” she says. “You clearly want to.”

 

“Mmm. Hang on. The SEP was _actually_ hardcore, so it’s hard to pick the right one.” He folds his hands on his stomach and leans his head back to contemplate the sky. Ana raps her fingers on her knee. “Okay, I got it.” he says after a minute.

 

“Do tell.”

 

“So SEP just completely changed our bodies, right? And that meant that our hormone balances changed too.” He pauses. “Jack had been on HRT before and he and the other trans participants who had done it would make fun of the rest of us, for being so out of it. They said the third time around, they had really gotten the hang of puberty.” He smiles and shakes his head. “Anyway. This was only my second go, and it was brutal. Mood swings, constantly sweating, voice cracking, all that shit.”

 

“You were right, that was very gross.”

 

“That wasn’t my story and you know it.” He shoves her and she cackles. “So anyway. One terrible morning, I wake up, go to the sink, lather up, look in the mirror. And then I see this super long gray hair coming out of the center of my forehead.”

 

“What?”

 

“Yeah, that was my reaction! So I look it up and turns out it’s a thing called a rogue hair. It’s weird but it happens, particularly with people with hormone imbalances. I pluck it and go about my day.”

 

“This wasn’t a very gross story,” Ana informs him. He grimaces.

 

“I’m still not done. I wake up the next day, and there are two now. Annoying, but I pluck them and go. Later that day, I get called in for a new treatment session, which means I’ll be out for like 24 hours. When I come to, the doctors are a little weird, but I don’t think anything of it. Walk down the halls back to my room. Some people stop and look at me, I say hey, they’re awkward, I’m just kind of offended. I get back to my room, Jack’s there. He takes one look at me and bursts out laughing.”

 

“How many?” Ana asks breathlessly.

 

“A fucking armpit’s worth, Ana.” Ana bursts out laughing herself, and Gabriel runs a hand down his face. “A fucking bush of gray hairs coming out of the middle of my forehead. I looked like an early Star Trek alien designed by someone with a very specific fetish.”

 

“Oh my God,” Ana says. “What did you do?”

 

“Well I didn’t want to shave them, because I thought they’d just regrow. So…”

 

“You didn’t.”

 

“I plucked them all,” Gabriel says, with a thousand yard stare. “It hurt like hell and Jack got a picture before I could get them all out.” Ana collapses on his shoulder and he looks down at her with narrowed eyes. “Don’t bother asking. He won’t show you. He likes having the blackmail potential too much.”

 

"That's not grosser than my story," Ana says, trying to catch her breath between words and giggles. "You're just grosser than me."

  
"Ha. Fair." Gabriel looks vaguely pleased with that assessment, but as Ana's laughter dies so does his smile. He looks lost in his thoughts again, and Ana elbows him. 

  
"Sorry," he says, shaking his head. "Whenever something genuinely scary went down, or whenever someone died, they would tell us, 'you're doing this for your country.' And you know, scary shit happened a lot, and people died a lot. So it ended up becoming a sort of meme for us. Jack said it to me, when I was plucking those stupid hairs.” He’s smiling again, but all melancholy now. “Maybe they actually meant it to be comforting. They probably did. But all it made me feel was like my reasons for signing up– to survive, to help my family survive, to help the world survive– had been bought out. It felt like I wasn't fighting for what I believed in anymore, I was just fighting for my country." 

  
Ana takes his hand. "You're here with us, now," she says. "You're our commander. And Jack’s the only one who shares a country with you. We’re fighting for the same shit you talked about. And none of us would rather fight for anything else." 

  
"Thanks," he says softly. "I just got an email from them the other day, saying the next time we're near a base Jack and I need to come in for testing. Like we're cars missing our scheduled maintenance." He rubs his face with the hand Ana’s not holding. “They gave me a new, better body and I should be grateful for that, but… I don’t know. Sometimes I worry that my family was right. Sometimes it feels like this body is still theirs, and I just have it on loan.”

 

Ana squeezes his hand and thinks. Thinks about the Egyptian politicians who descend on her whenever she comes home, gracefully segueing from thanking her for her service to interrogating her on Gabriel and Adawe and Petras. Thinks about how the Joint Chief of Staff said to her, “You may be serving under an American, but don’t forget who gave you that eye.” About the other two people who were given implants– killed in combat and taken back to the lab for postmortem analysis. About funerals with no bodies and devote grandparents wailing. She doesn’t know if they ever gave them the bodies.

 

Gabriel is looking concerned for her now. He’s watching her closely and his brow is furrowed. He doesn’t relax when she smiles weakly and squeezes his hand.

 

“I’d like to see them try to take them back,” she says. He blinks and then laughs softly.

 

“And with whatever we get after these, we’ll survive,” he says. “We’ll make them pay.” The laptops are still and silent and the sun is down. Ana nods along to his promise and closes her eyes.

**Author's Note:**

> I used biopower as one of my theoretical frameworks for my thesis and ever since Foucault has been appearing in my mirror and mocking me.
> 
> I'm @tacticalgrandma on tumblr if you want to talk to me there!
> 
> Thank you so much for reading, and any comments/kudos would mean the world to me <3


End file.
